Anyway, she would buy a new bed jacket and would see if she could find shirts for Trevil; his beloved white ones were running low.
But what was the use of buying Trevil shirts?
She was certain she had fixed his orange juice the night before, as soon as she had had the idea about the iodine. She remembered the feel of the pin-tipped cork against her cold fingers; she remembered the heavy way the refrigerator door had closed afterwards, with the full glass chilling inside, ready for Trev in the morning.
Certainly she had wiped the squeezer and put the rinds in the garbage can. She had come down to breakfast to find Trev calmly drinking his juice, with his bacon and eggs waiting before him.
But nothing had happened. His expression had not changed. He had not choked, or gasped, or fallen to the floor. He had finished his breakfast and kissed her and said good-bye as though iodine in his orange juice were a common occurrence.
Afterwards, she went to look in the refrigerator. There was no glass of orange juice in it. The light glinted brightly on meat and eggs and butter. Bottles of milk stood on a shelf. A piece of cheese was wrapped in waxed paper.
Poisoned cheese to kill a rat.
How could you tell if the light went out once you closed the refrigerator door?
Chapter 17
You could start at the front end where you got on, just in back of the baggage car, and by opening and closing vestibule doors, walk through every part of the train. It was full of people, and full of different places. You met friends with whom you chatted a while, and men with whom you spent the night. You ate meals with lots of boys and girls in the dining car, a strange place full of hamburg joints, sandwiches pushed across a counter, Coca-Colas, canteen coffee and ginger ale.
Showing no partiality, you moved back and forth from one table to another, from Dirty Dick’s to Antoine’s, from Dinah’s Shack to the Brown Derby, from the New Willard to Child’s, from the Busy Bee to the Stork and Twenty-One.
Ham and beans with Jack and Jill, barbecue with Bobby, mussels with Mona, terrapin with Trevil, and green pea soup with Paul. You slyly avoided your father who was eating at many tables. It wasn’t much fun to eat with a man who paid more attention to a book a la torts than to broccoli hollandaise untouched on the dish before him.
Lots of people who ate with you, you found again in the club car. There was Bob, of course, enmeshed in a chain of naked girls and icy cold martinis. You brushed by him hurriedly, shuddering, afraid he would see you and add you to his nudist ranch. Seated and drinking your own martinis, you were equally afraid he wouldn’t see you and wouldn’t call. You were glad you could keep your clothes on, for you dreaded the competition. The naked women were beautiful, smart and sexy. Against such brainy pulchritude, you stood no chance at all.
The conclusion reached from this data is that maybe Dr. Neckhair is right. Otherwise, how have I remembered the term, “compulsive modesty”? Am I always compelled to take a second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth place and constrict my own life within narrow boundaries?
Get on with the tour—you’re writing now about somebody else. Case History: Anonymous 29129Y. “File it please in the locked file, Mrs. Sherrett, under the S’s. S—not for Sherrett, but for Strong. Natalie Strong.”
Keep on moving! Plenty of other boys will stop you as you go along.
“Hello, beautiful!” That one’s dead.
“Have a drink!” That one’s dead.
“H’ya, toots!” That one’s blind.
“Hi there, luscious!” That sergeant’s alive, in a plaster cast somewhere from the middle down.
Sweetheart! Baby! Toots!
“Hey, Nat, do you work in this joint for love or money? You don’t look very strong.”
There’s your father, reading a book and drinking his sherry. The country’s in a neurotic trend, and drink and the devil have done for the rest. You better get out of the club car, baby, your loving daddy wouldn’t approve. You’ve been here far too long.
Why were doors on a train always so hard to open, threatening to crush you before you got through? The next car was full of compartments. You shut your eyes and brushed hurriedly by Bedroom “A.” They might have taken the number down, but you couldn’t fool yourself. You’d always be able to recognize 2601.
“There’s a message for Mrs. Natalie Helms.”
“There can’t be any message for me.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s for you.”
You’d always tipped the porters well. Why didn’t this one go on and make up his berths, instead of trying to torture you?
Bedroom “B” and Compartment “C.”
You’d better scoot out of there, sister, before the Sherrett family gets you!
The compartments were all well occupied and recognizable—“D,” “E,” “F,” and “G,” and sometimes “Y” and “W.” A hotel room in San Francisco; Luigi’s restaurant, escaped from the dining car; a bathroom full of medicine; the Lancaster School, dispensing sexless sanity for lazy ladies; the Robert Helms Baby Factory for Virginia Virgins—Mares and Mammas bred on order to registered sires, white grandparents furnished at slightly extra cost.
Nat brushed hurriedly by them all, opened two doors and found herself in the library car.
It was a beautiful library, although a trifle gloomy, and certainly worthy of occupying an entire car. The designer probably had that in mind when the long narrow room was built into the house in Washington. But it always had needed an organ to make it complete. Sonorous anthems should have rolled up to the stained-glass windows which topped the shelves of leather-covered volumes.
A stepladder on rollers could be moved along the wall, a device which young Natalie Strong found it stimulating to ride on, propelling it with one foot like a scooter.
Hundreds and hundreds of volumes, and nothing for a girl to read. No Little Women. No Campfire Girls. No Frances Hodgson Burnett. Just hundreds of books that got leather on your clothes and dust on your hands. Books that were written in a language that seemed to be half English and half some jargon translatable only by your father and the dead and gone Supreme Court Justice who had collected them.
Op. Cit. No. 2615 N. Y. Dist. 249, 1903.
Belden and Co., Inc. vs. The People—whoever the people were. Probably the ones who were now in danger of becoming enmeshed in neurotic trends.
Other shapes flitted back and forth through the library, but Natalie didn’t find them disturbing. An angular governess, Miss Fentress. Fraulein Bachmann, a chubby German woman who wore perfectly round steel-rimmed glasses and who appeared to be constantly peering over her shoulder in terror at the results of World War I.
How many hours of Nat’s precious time had Fraulein wasted, forcing the unwilling girl into arduous scales on the grand piano which Nat still couldn’t play?
Through an archway, which could be closed off by sliding doors, Nat could see her father bent over his desk in the adjoining room. Judging by pictures, her father looked much like Woodrow Wilson, except that her relationship with the President, whom she had never seen, was probably closer.
Curled up in the depths of a great leather armchair, Natalie watched her father at his mysterious work, and was glad she had never been born.
Nat knew her mother almost as well as she knew President Wilson, forty times better than she knew her father. Her mother was a conveniently convertible creature who never appeared in anything but beribboned shifts. Sometimes her mother had dark shining hair, and sometimes she was very blonde. Nat’s mother thought that all life was a joke. She was constantly laughing. Pressed against the beribboned shifts, Nat could feel her mother shaking with mirth, and felt very safe and warm.
Protecting Mr. Strong’s celibacy by delivering his daughter fully clothed and fully formed at the age of two was one of the jokes Nat’s mother had played on Mr. Strong. Nat remembered the delivery well. Her mother had picked her up out of her nest in the leather chair in the library, carried her through the dark, arched doorway, and
placed her on the desk in front of Mr. Strong. Thereupon, her mother had vanished in a cloud of frilly underwear.
“She is dead in both my sight and yours,” was all the abating of curiosity that Natalie ever got from Mr. Strong.
But she wasn’t quite dead, for Nat found lots of her mother’s traits vividly living within herself, particularly when her boisterousness annoyed her father.
If she strummed the piano while he was working: “You’re as noisy as your mother!” said Mr. Strong.
If she buried herself in the Sunday comics: “You have every one of your mother’s tastes,” said Mr. Strong.
If she slipped downstairs in her nightgown, nocturnally raiding the icebox: “You have all of your mother’s immodesty,” said Mr. Strong.
He could reverse it, too. If Nat was late, her mother had always been on time. If Nat was shy, her mother had been a woman of nerve. Try as she might, Nat never could equal her mother’s beauty. Her mother had played Bach and Beethoven. Her mother had known how to fix her hair, her nails and her eyebrows, and unerringly how to choose her clothes.
Ignorant, unattractive girl, get away from that book and out of that chair! Dust the house and polish the silver. Learn to cook and learn to sew. Learn to play and learn to sing. Learn to laugh when I need cheering up, and to sit in repose when I’m busy.
Ugly duckling, left on my desk by an immaculate delivery, learn to be all the good things your mother was, and none of the bad. Don’t be yourself, be somebody else I’m longing for. Be like the woman I’m keeping alive. She’s perfect, at least in my memory. You, the unwanted, are under my nose every minute. You’re competing with a fairy, so everything you do is bound to be wrong. (No wonder she was scared of Trevil’s mother, dead and gone.)
Her father had been dead for years, and she’d just found how to beat him!
That was a lie, if she ever wrote one! Back you go to the leather chair in the library car on the speeding train.
Watch the little devil work!
She knew her father’s every need, his every weak necessity, his need for personal admiration, his dread of humiliation, the necessity he had of never needing anybody, or yielding to any influence, or being tied down to anything since his beautiful wife had gone. Nat had known how to twist every one of those things to get her own way, but she hadn’t known that she’d known until this minute.
Watch the little devil work! It won’t take long.
She had friends in the house, plenty of company, although very few girls actually came to see her. She preferred her men friends, anyhow. Sir Gwynneth who stood at the foot of the stairs in his suit of armor was a sly one. He had carried her rose and her glove into a hundred jousting matches, and more than once one of her stockings, or a pair of panties which she forced him to swallow unresistingly by opening his visor.
Nat had never managed to accompany him herself, because her one attempt, when her father was out, had brought Sir Gwynneth crashing down lustfully on top of her. Miss Fentress and the current colored maid, performing the job of extrication, had discovered Sir Gwynneth’s load of pants and stockings. A nice household wrangle had ensued, since Miss Fentress had been more or less openly accusing the maid of purloining Nat’s stockings and underwear. After that, Sir Gwynneth was forced to joust unaided by trophies.
Her father had been busy all morning, and eaten lunch in his study. Nat was sick of it—the gloomy, leather-bound house, the “Op.’s N. Y.” volumes, Washington’s snow-bound winter keeping her a prisoner, and the drivel over the radio which had to be kept so low. She decided to spend the afternoon in bed with the Union General.
It wasn’t exactly a new idea, for she had slept with him many times before. He hung over the mantelpiece, on horseback, and wore a sword like Jurgen’s. Even though his whiskers tickled her neck, she admired them greatly. She could give herself delightful chills over a single glance from his roving eye and the terrible thought of what he must have done in his day to the belles of the Southland. Sometimes the general strode into the room and threatened her with his waving saber. Other times he galloped in and hopped into bed with her, horse and all.
But to further this project she must gain her father’s attention. She got it fiercely in ten minutes by talking in a modulated monotone to Sir Gwynneth, and forcing Sir Gwynneth to answer by moving his iron jaw. The jaw squeaked, a beautiful, rasping squeak which Natalie had learned through practice how to regulate from high to low.
It took ten minutes before her father, white with rage, came stomping out through his study door. “Daughter, I have told you I am trying to work. What in the name of heaven are you doing?”
From then on it was easy. There were a million ways, ranging from a burst of tears and a stamp of the foot, to a studied insolence of expression.
They were all on the train together. Everyone except her mother. Maybe the train had come out into daylight for a little while. That looked like a gleam of sunshine, shining through the stained-glass windows far up above the books in the library car.
Chapter 18
“Where on earth are my swatches,, Trev, have you seen them?”
Trevil looked up from his book to see Natalie peering at him anxiously from the oak-framed double doors that separated hall from living-room. She was wearing green denim clamdiggers and a white cotton blouse, with a wide red cummerbund tied around her slim waist. A costume for work.
“Swatches? What swatches?”
“I brought them home yesterday,” Natalie said. “All kinds of them. They were in three bundles, some cotton, some silks and damask, and some taffeta. Now I can’t find them anywhere.”
“Darling,” said Trev, “I haven’t seen your swatches.” His frown was worried. “I didn’t know you were in town yesterday.”
“Of course I was,” said Natalie. “I took the ten-two in and the three-fifty back and I spent the whole time at Proctors picking out my materials. I told you about it at dinner.”
Trev put down his book, came to her, and gently touched the wide red sash.
“That’s a pretty gadget you’re wearing,” he said. “What were you planning to do?”
Natalie felt her knees shaking. This is horror, she thought, or almost horror. There was something silky and menacing in the way Trev had said that, and in the way he had touched her sash. As if he knew something she didn’t know. As if the whole scene were part of his plan. If he meant to kill her, and most certainly he did, why didn’t he get it over with quickly and decently, without subjecting her to this hare-and-hounds torture, this carefully thought out game of cat and mouse?
The exhilaration she had felt earlier in the morning had completely left her, to be replaced by a depression and fear that were now commonplace. Still she would have to smile, and pretend it was all just a joke. Two could play. For some strange reason, he was trying to convince her that there were no swatches, that there never had been any, that she had not stowed them away in her dresser drawer yesterday afternoon when she had returned from town.
Returned from town she most certainly had; she could remember exactly what it was like on the train. The seats had been a very dusty plush and the air in the car had been too warm.
“Well,” she said, smiling up at him hesitantly, marvelling at the way he composed his face as though he were actually worried about her swatches and her plans, “I thought I might do something about the bulbs. I wanted to get them out early this year.”
“Yes,” said Trev. “And the swatches? Can I help you find them?”
How keen his eyes were, like the eyes of a hunter sighting his covey, the gun swinging in its arc to the right position, the right bird found, the hand ready to contract on the trigger.
“No,” said Natalie firmly. Her voice grew harsh, silencing hysteria that was forcing its way up into her tightened throat. “No, I must have been mistaken. I remember now, I had the swatches sent.”
“Nat,” he said helplessly. “Nat .…”
She winked back tears, left him standing t
here, watching her as she ran up the stairs to her room.
It must be Saturday, or Trev would not be home. Therefore yesterday, Friday, she had actually gone in to town and had looked at materials with a view to doing over the living-room. She had always wanted to change the living-room and now she had actually decided to do it. This morning she had dressed in denims so that she and Trev could hold the pieces of material to the chairs and windows and choose the right colors and weights.
But she had made one mistake. She had forgotton how much Trev was like his mother.
Mrs. Sherrett had to be approached obliquely.
They had talked about the party for a long time. The idea was Mrs. Sherrett’s. She must introduce Natalie to all Trev’s friends. Mrs. Sherrett said, “This house needs gaiety. It needs a party.”
The old lady had touched her eyes with a dainty square of white cambric. “Trev’s father used to love to entertain,” she said. “But since he died, the two of us, alone …”
Natalie’s heart had gone out to her, and the two of them had busily planned.
“How about one of those Sunday afternoon things,” Natalie suggested, “with cocktails and a buffet supper? That might be fun.”
“Lovely,” Mrs. Sherrett agreed, her eyes vague. “For later on perhaps. Just now, I think perhaps we ought to have something more formal. Dancing. The house lends itself beautifully to dancing. With, of course, the punchbowl, salad, sandwiches, an aspic.”
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